Monday, August 9, 2010

In Loving Memory of Izumi Sakai

The clip above is from the last and only live tour by ZARD, Budokan, 2004. The group is no longer active following the death of Sakai Izumi, the lead vocalist in 2007.

She was one of the dying breed of versatile and simple singers like Harry Nilsson, who rarely performed live and had a modest life in relative obscurity despite her album sold in millions.It is hard to recognise that the world has been going on for over three years since Sakai passed away. She was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2006 with distant metastasis to her lungs. She is immediately hospitalised but sadly perished in February of the year after(not directly to cancer, nevertheless attributable) at the mere age of 40.

Back when the news of her death broke, I was particularly offended by a comment to the meaning of "she deserved what she had got because she had a venereal disease" Excuse me, HPV can be transmitted sexually, but I am ready to thrust my pitchfork if you carry on to imply (without evidence) that "she is a slut".

I had to relive my anger today as two different lecturers mentioned HPV vaccine and the problems of distributing the vaccine among the vulnerable population. Most resistance, surprisingly, came from parents, who reckons that vaccination will make their daughters have less fears of sexual intercourse, which of course might lead to another assortment of undesirable things.

How could a mature person think like that is truly beyond me. What kind of a cold-blooded sadist put their self-righteous moral standards before life and death?

As a firm believer of free will, I have no basis to judge people on their freedom of choice in their lives, including their sexual orientation. Over time, I have observed the fact that the most vocal homophobes are fags in denial.

On the other hand, accuse me for double standards if you have to, I do have issues with some people in the LGBT subculture. They can be roughly divided into two groups:

- The reactionary type who, upon any constructive criticism, react with the assumption the world is biased against them. For example Chris Carter MP, who with great zeal defended his right to excessive spending on taxpayer's tabs, all because he is subject to unfair public scrutiny due to his own homosexuality.

I can see his logic, which is probably a self-fulfilling prophecy as long as he continues to give gay people a bad name

- The disillusioned type who, following admission to their own homosexuality, took it as their license to promiscuity and irresponsibility. Or worse, to cause harm in innocent people.

Wake up, most developed societies of the world are amply enlightened, as long as they live a moral life like the most other people.

Irrelevant good news: Froyo is coming to Milestone at last, minus built-in tethering and a few other bits but those wont be missed.

I have been using andriod phone for a while and I have little to complain about. The only thing is the behavior once "low memory" warning kicks in: sms will drop without warning, sync functions will cease and other weird things happen, most of them without any indication that is it related to low memory. So the phone goes into voluntary brain spasm once available NAND storage gets below 20MB, and the situation gets somewhat paradoxical since the 20MB mark is set to prevent loss of data but data will be lost anyway.....